Sammy Hagar Says Chickenfoot is ‘Man for Man’ Better Than Van Halen

With Chickenfoot in the midst of a brief overseas tour, the members of the band have been hitting the promotional trail, doing rounds of interviews in support of their latest release, ‘Chickenfoot III.’ And you know what that means: plenty of questions about the new Van Halen record. Chickenfoot singer (and ex-VH vocalist) Sammy Hagar has never been shy about expressing his opinions when it comes to his former bandmates, and he didn’t pull any punches when the subject came up again during a recent interview with Radio Metal.

Though he insisted that his recent focus is on being more positive — and responded to an early question by saying simply “If you don’t have anything good to say about someone, you’d better shut up” — Sammy eventually expressed more disappointment with Van Halen’s new music, arguing that the band has lost its way creatively.

“I think they chose to take the easy route and take some of their old stuff and and re-record it instead of writing new songs,” argued Hagar. “Who is Van Halen today? I don’t know, I don’t think the fans are going to be happy with it…To me it makes a strange statement, it kind of says ‘We don’t have anything, we’re not a band anymore, we’re not creative.’ Isn’t it a strange statement to you?”

“I think there’s zero inspiration and zero creativity. If there was any, they would write new songs,” he continued. “When Chickenfoot got together for our first album, we were four new guys and we got together and wrote ten, twelve songs and made an album. When we decided to do our second album, we didn’t go back and take the two songs that were left over from the first album, we wrote all brand new songs. We’re new people, we’re inspired.”

Asked if he agreed with Michael Anthony’s statement that Chickenfoot would happily do some shows with Van Halen, Hagar chortled, “Hell yes! Are you kidding? Right now, for free. They wouldn’t even have to pay me.”

From Hagar’s perspective, it’d be a pretty lopsided bill: “If you take Joe versus Eddie, you take Dave versus me, Wolfie versus Mikey, Chad or Kenny versus Al… I mean, come on! You know what I mean? Man for man, who can sing the best? Dave or I, today? Who can play the best? Joe or Eddie, today? Who could play or sing the best? Wolfie or Mikey?”

So far, our readers seem to be siding with Hagar in at least one way, with Chickenfoot’s current single ‘Different Devil’ enjoying a comfortable lead in the Readers’ Poll pitting it against Van Halen’s comeback track ‘Tattoo.’